Many of you take part in our annual satisfaction surveys. You share opinions, discuss challenges, and make valuable recommendations. More than 65,000 customers and partners responded to our survey during the first half of FY13.  For this installment of the "We're Listening" blog series,  I asked Joe Pinto, Senior Vice President, Technical Services, to review these responses and what we're doing to improve your Cisco experience.

  By Guest Contributor Joe Pinto

While overall feedback from our customers and partners in FY13 has been positive, we know there is a continuous need for improvement. One of the questions you often ask is, "What is Cisco doing to make Cisco easier to do business with?" Here's a sampling of areas you've asked us to address and progress we're making in those areas: 

Technical Assistance Center (TAC):You expect to talk with the right expert quickly and don't want to repeat yourself.

• To address a top customer concern with technical support, we've implemented an improved, intelligent routing engine that works to match your issue to the right TAC Expert the first time. Our new collaborative escalation model helps to avoid transferring your case to other engineers multiple times and having to re-explain your issue. The first TAC engineer you speak with becomes the case owner and is responsible for bringing in any other experts needed to work on the problem.

One customer recently had this say about our new approach:

"A TAC Engineer brought in two other teams to handle different questions I had with this issue. This was great service and prevented me from opening two additional TAC cases...it was a great experience on my side."

Cisco.com: You expect a user-friendly interface, effective search tool, and fast software downloads.

• We've increased the personalized functionality and content on Cisco.com in order to tailor your experience based on your products, past activities, and technical support history.
• Search and navigation improvements have made it 77% faster to find the software you need, coupled with software download speeds that are more than 4 times faster.

Order Management: You expect to configure, quote, and order Cisco products easily.

• We've delivered improvements in configuring, quoting, and submitting orders-resulting in faster booking times to ensure on-time delivery of your products. 
• The new Cisco ordering tool-Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW)-offers improved usability. Approximately 95% of all CCW orders "auto-book," which means those orders are booked within two hours, speeding delivery to you without any manual intervention.
• You can now open and track cases through Customer Service Central, a newly launched portal that consolidates multiple case management applications into one destination. For the first time, you can now submit customer service cases related to both Cisco products and services through a single interface.

Software Licensing: You expect simple, easy-to-use licensing, so we are working to simplify our software lifecycle from end-to-end, including license pooling, simpler product registration and entitlement transfers, and a single software asset manager to track all Cisco software usage within your network.

• You now have one location where you can access all software management tools.  At Cisco Software Central, you can get quotes, order software, get licensing, and download and upgrade your Cisco software.
• We have enhanced Product License Registration with self-service capabilities to rehost, resend, look-up, edit, and register multiple licenses quickly and easily. You can also bulk load and register multiple product activation keys (PAKs) or licenses for multiple devices within a single registration.
• Additionally, our eDelivery program has over 3,900 Cisco software products available online, and can save you time and money. Visit L- (License) and R- (Software) SKUs to see if your product is available through eDelivery (if not, keep checking; we add more products every month).

I'm excited about the progress we're making and what's yet to come as we continue to make your optimal Cisco experience our top priority. The annual surveys and your interactions with us on this blog are just two of the ways we capture your feedback and take action on it. Cisco business leaders and customer experience experts participate in a multitude of events all year long where we have the opportunity to connect with customers and partners, and hear first-hand about what's working and where we can do better: Customer and Partner advisory boards, focus groups, Cisco Live, Partner Summit, transactional surveys, just to name a few. Please continue to follow the We're Listening blog for additional information on how your feedback is making a difference in the way we work and how we're striving to improve your Cisco experience.

Send comments and questions to [email protected].